Recent reviews by Phoenix

Worth to get with a huge discount. It's very engaging, stressful, mostly looks beautiful and nails the right atmosphere. Could be exceptional if they would manage to properly polish the thing.

Unfortunately, instead, you can safely consider it abandoned. And oh gawd it can annoy you with little things way better than your ex.

Marines ignore orders. Objective markers disappear from the map. Critters suddenly spawn in a room two meters away, nullifying the point of having a motion detector and ruining a stealth streak you desperately worked on for the last 5 reloads. Weird and sudden difficulty spikes. Loot you can't pick up. Pathfinding issues. Ugly character models and worst hair modelling in history (seriously, buy this just to be amazed there's a person on this planet who once said "Yeah, this moustache looks fine, get this to production"). In-between-missions UI that is a perfect example how to waste all the screen space and hide all the important info behind unnecessary clicks & hovering over. That dialogue which played while my squad was on another floor, making me look for non-existing body for 5 minutes and doubt my sanity. The list can go on and on.

Still a decent game though. Not recommending it would be a crime.

What if a town from Banished had grown to a 100K people?

What if to get something going, you personally have to take care of roads, housing, building materials, storages, raw materials & finished products distribution, vehicles repair, electricity, heating, water, sewage, garbage disposal, pollution, city transport, immigration, tourism, crime, healthcare, sports and entertainment?

What if a failed plan could lead to people actually dying? What if a tragic chain of events could end up in a country wipe? What if an innocent-looking city-sim made you loose the hard way?

W&R wanders into several sim subgenres at once, and is not subtle in doing that: it knocks down doors, beats everyone in the room into a pulp and declares "I own this place now!". This is not an unfair statement. From now on, a lot of games would have to stand an extremely tough comparison. Both W&R sheer complexity and incredible flexibility are extremely hard to beat.

Of course, when you deal with a scale of several genres at once, especially for a small dev team, it doesn't come without a cost. Some mechanics could be made better. There's a small amount of jank here and there. There are some unexpected restrictions which probably won't be lifted. There's some lack of buildings variety, although the latter is rather already solved by fantastic and plentiful workshop assets.

Also, there's a steep learning curve. Yeah, I said steep. Let me repeat to let it settle: p-r-e-t-t-y s-t-e-e-p. W&R does many things in a very smart and logical but not-so-conventional way, so many blunt player attempts to do stuff without learning & experimenting first end up in a failure. Thankfully, difficulty settings are well thought-through: W&R allows you to turn the whole mechanics on and off to make an experience as forgiving as you like. There's also a campaign that is meant to gradually teach you. There are great guides and Youtube videos. Once you pass this learning barrier, you'll be delighted, but passing it takes time & effort. W&R is rather not for the faint of heart.

Overall, W&R is an extremely bold project which, through years of work, ended up being a fantastic game. It's not perfect but comes very close. Even if, due to its complexity, it won't end up as a massive hit, it will surely become a cult classic.

I was hoping to find a good story but was concerned about finding a bad one.

What I didn't expect to find is such a complete failure to piece up any meaningful or even coherent story at all. The game tries to build mystical tension but never cares to resolve it. The author literally doesn't bother to fill the player in to let him assemble any remotely logical picture. All the critical pieces that would shed some light, are missing.

This makes it feel, somehow, both extremely primitive and confusing at the same time. All the unfolding events are predictable a mile away, but your understanding of why all this is happening never really advances much from a vague "Something wrong happened here and it is related to plants".

To add insult to injury, during final sequence, both protagonists you controlled during the game, all of a sudden and with no apparent reason, start acting like they just received divine revelation and finally realized the full picture. Which just made me yelling at the screen: "How about any of you, dipwits, finally explain to ME what the whole drama is about?"

What a waste of time.

Masterfully crafted experience, where a refreshingly good story is delivered with great style and pace, complimented with beautiful visuals and excellent voiceover. Outstanding.

I wish this game the best, it looks promising and I hope devs could get in on the right track.
So, TL:DR is not a loud "No!" but rather "Manage your expectations very carefully".

In worst case scenario it will eventually become a decent casual city builder once bugs and performance issues are ironed out. Good-looking, scratching the right itch, with plenty of content to explore.

But if you're looking for solid survival element, or simply decent and consistent "town/resource/economy management" formula (a.k.a "something that could de-throne Banished"), there's a lot of concerns.

To make a good town sim, there must be a solid game design foundation to build upon; also, this foundation (rules) should be made transparent. Currently, FF fails at both areas, to a degree that seems way too bad even for EA.

Speaking of transparency, it's not there yet at all. Rules are as obscure as they could be, leaving you to a lot of guesswork. But that's a smaller problem.

Good gameplay design is way harder to achieve. Fair description at this point is "Errr...we're figuring this thing out". Even "work in progress" might be a bit too generous.

Some really decent ideas are thrown into a pot filled with undercooked, unbalanced, artificially induced, cheese-prone or outright silly mechanics and systems. There are issues on every level. Starting with logistics as a whole (a heart of a good sim) being primitive to a point of a facepalm and .... in need of complete overhaul? Ending up in somewhat bearable, but either very roughly drafted, or unrealistic, or in dire need of recalibrating.... economy, production, buildings, map generation etc. Spiced with numerous bugs, this brew generates constant stream of comical moments.

Here's just a little taste of what to expect.

1). Animal barn. Holds cows. Produces milk and meat. Can have up to 2 workers; max. amount of cows differs in the very same interface window, so...unknown? If you don't build a fence around, a bear could get in. If you build a fence, cows can't get out (teaching cows a concept of gates is promised in future patches). Requires grain to be stored to feed cows. So, one of the workers is constantly running to get grain while another herds animals. Barn is supposed to produce terrifying amounts of meat. But, since both workers are always busy with other stuff and there's also tons of milk to haul, 90% of freshly-made meat, I kid you not, spoils right in the barn. Despite having a cellar right across the road, they never have time to haul everything. If I fire one, the second will probably commit suicide since it's the easiest option.

2). Miller & Baker. Batman & Robin, superheroes of the town. With one worker, mill makes such UNGODLY amounts of flour that citizens suspect dark magic. We barely keep up feeding diabolic mechanism with grains. Miller is one of the reasons barn guys are so burnt out: damn wheat tends to disappear before they can even reach the warehouse.

Baker, miller's brother-in-dark arts, also being alone on the premise, transforms all that flour into bread with a lightning speed. Also, unlike every other industrial buildings, bakery is strategically placed among people's homes since, unlike other industry, it doesn't decrease but improves "area desirability", helping houses to develop. Still, we lose a third of bread to spoilage, since there's no way to slow either of these fools down or distribute bread in any smarter way.

Still, despite the issues, I could hire second workers into Mill & Bakery and feed my whole town! What a wonderful opportunity! I can get rid of the whole bunch of those lazy hunters/foragers/arborists, burn down animal barn (finally!), and we'll still be fine. If not for damn Mill being locked behind artifical "Town Tier" system, I would do that right from the start!

There's a problem though: it turns out dough needs water, and a lone baker managed to dry out all three wells in the area. Bakery, may I remind, is in the middle of living quarter. We have a strict "one shower per year" policy on the block, but that's not enough. Wells can't refill. People complain. There are rumors of citizens being hurt over a glass of water. I could plop a couple more wells on the block, but a) it looks really silly; b) wells get way less water when there's another well nearby, so it's might turn out being worse than before; c) I would have to move some houses to another place, thus, at best, loosing some taxes (don't ask).

I would move the bakery itself to somewhere else, but that would decrease area "desirability", so my most prestigious houses can suddenly become "abandoned". I guess it's better to be thirsty & unwashed than homeless, so I guess we're keeping the status quo. At least, unpleasant smell in town regularly gets mixed with fantastic fresh bread aroma.

3). Finally, food distribution, markets and logistics in general. Remember Banished? "Everybody has its place and a dedicated job. Every job is simple. Every problem is visible." Good times.

What we have in FF? First, multi-tasking. Hunter usually brings meat to storage so it can be picked up by a meat smoker. But smoker can also start a long journey straight to a hunter cabin if there's no meat in storage. Detecting where exactly things are going wrong in your supply chain is incredibly hard. But that's only the peak of the iceberg.

Let's talk about food. All food spoils. You can store it in root cellars (least spoilage), general storages (medium spoilage, but can also hold non-food items). At last there are markets, where food spoils faster than everywhere else, but these are structures meant not to store, but "help to distribute". Looks good.

There's the catch though: when a citizen wants to get stuff, he goes not to a market, but to the closest source that has the item. It could be market in some particular moment, but if the root cellar is closer, the citizen will go there instead. People can bring stuff home from bakery or even from their work. Unlike, say, in Banished, which has an actual effective priority system (for a good reason).

You might think: "Right stuff ends up in the right hands, what's the problem?"

Now, consider this: naturally, citizens spend most of their time at work. So, when they run out of stuff, they are, usually, somewhere around buildings they work in.

Naturally, these buildings are away from their homes (desirability mechanic sends its regards; you can't keep farms, barns or most of the industry close to homes). Market, on the opposite, is, naturally, close to their home. Also, naturally, there's usually some kind of storage in between. Because it's the most natural place to build it - somewhere in-between industry and markets, so both avoid excessive running.

Thus, when a random Sally runs out of something, she usually starts from her workplace and goes straight to the nearest root cellar, since it's on her way home anyway. The only reason for her to visit market is to grab ocassional candle and show grocer a middle finger. I kid you not, in naturally built city, this happens 95% of the time. The only people who visit actual market for full restock, are, basically, children, and laborers who, during their aimless wander, ended up "being in a wrong part of town".

I won't even vent about grocer's AI. At least, this guy, despite being deeply traumatized by the number of middle fingers seen during the day, tries to keep bringing supplies to the marketplace. His job, is, effectively, spoiling as much food as possible. But it's not his fault. Can I get rid of him? No, he "generates taxes". If I start venting about economy, this rant will be endless so I'll stop here.

Summary: mostly, all of this reminds me of socialism we once built in USSR. You can be at pointless job, steal stuff from work, even harm instead of being useful. But we'll have to keep you on the job, citizen. Keep a straight face.

It's a game where you literally watch as plants grow.

Quite unique and interesting game revolving around spying over people as a member of secret society. Also, a good satire over human society, nature, and vices, written with style and a great sense of humour. Worth checking out, especially if you liked Orwell / Beholder games.

Cons:
Minor lack of content:
Despite the game has some replay value, and set of stories is randomized, consecutive replays would probably involve too much repetition over the stories you've already seen too many times. So, more story content definitely wouldn't hurt.

Unbalanced and cruel pace:
The game features tons of small details you can discover and laugh about. Unfortunately, especially on first plays, the player might quite often feel so rushed not to miss something important for investigation that it completely leaves him no time to enjoy even a short well-written text he discovered. A game pause during certain actions would solve this frustrating moments easily.

After GTA IV, I started to hate pigeons. Now, I also hate ravens.

After Alan Wake, I've got a stockpile of lightbulbs. Now, I keep 'em in my bedroom. Along with a box of nails.

My best friend's name is Agatha. She's the best shovel in the world. Probably, the only one left, too.

I keep the flashlight on me everywhere I go. I've got rid of all the radios. I can guess your PIN code by looking at your child's drawings. I've even got a wristwatch, once again after 15 years. I'm prepared.

Just don't ask me to look under my bed. No, I'm not afraid.

I just don't want to know.

Hard West lacks complexity and replayability of genre icons, but definitely has its own style and charm. I wasn't expecting much looking at all the reviews, but it surpassed my initial scepticism.

Yes, it will never be called truly great. Yes, its batlle mechanics is simpler in comparison to mighty XCOM. Yes, battle interface wouldn't mind a slight polish. And it's rather unlikely that you would want to play campaign more than a couple of times (but since it is story-driven, I don't consider this a problem).

But, it is still quite a decent and refreshing attempt. Its plot about Wild West with a demonic twist is quite engaging. Campaign consists of several different scenarios, each telling their part of the story from different characters's perspective. Besides several fights, each scenario has a strategic layer, where you advance the story through moving your party from place to place and solving text-based quests. They won't change the final outcome, but might reward or punish you in different ways.

Battle system lack variety a bit, but I still find it decent. On one hand, the Luck system they introduced often encourages you for risky moves. On another hand, such behaviour might be (you knew, you knew!) fatal. An interesting combination, in my view.

Just do yourself a favor and start playing on Hard difficulty right from the start, because that's the only way it can shine. Characters are pretty fragile in each difficulty (which complements to atmosphere, in my view). Still, difficulties below favor player too much and might ruin the impression: Easy is a kindergarten and Normal is often as challenging as dishwashing. On Hard (especially with Combat wounds/Ironman options), things get much more entertaining: AI becomes much more brazen; enemies get more HP so you can't one-shot left and right no more; your party members have, at best, a slight HP advantage over a generic cowboy. Adding the fact that you're always outnumbered, it feels much more tense.

Overall: has its flaws but has its moments. Very pretty looking. Won't be the thing for which you miss your sleep time, but definitely above mediocrity and nice to spent some evenings with.

Even if you're making a game about Eternal Void, you should put some substance into it.
Wasted 8 hours trying to find something positive. All I found was a lonely viking travelling through vast empty spaces, doing nothing aside from some annoying boss fights.
Bland, ultimately boring, sedative experience. The essence of emptiness.